Sunday, October 20, 2024

A01797 - John Cage, American Composer and Music Theorist

 Cage, John - A00050

"Our intention is to affirm this life; not to bring order out of chaos, not to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord."  (11/03/2023)

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John Cage
Cage in 1988
Born
John Milton Cage Jr.

September 5, 1912
Los Angeles, California
DiedAugust 12, 1992 (aged 79)
New York City, U.S.
Alma materPomona College
Occupations
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1935; div. 1945)​
PartnerMerce Cunningham
Signature

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John Cage (born September 5, 1912, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died August 12, 1992, New York, New York) was an American avant-garde composer whose inventive compositions and unorthodox ideas profoundly influenced mid-20th-century music.


The son of an inventor, Cage briefly attended Pomona College and then traveled in Europe for a time. Returning to the United States in 1931, he studied music with Richard Buhlig, Arnold Schoenberg, Adolph Weiss, and Henry Cowell. While teaching in Seattle (1938–40), Cage organized percussion ensembles to perform his compositions. He also experimented with works for dance, and his subsequent collaborations with the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham sparked a long creative and romantic partnership.


Cage’s early compositions were written in the 12-tone method of his teacher Schoenberg, but by 1939 he had begun to experiment with increasingly unorthodox instruments such as the “prepared piano” (a piano modified by objects placed between its strings in order to produce percussive and otherworldly sound effects). Cage also experimented with tape recorders, record players, and radios in his effort to step outside the bounds of conventional Western music and its concepts of meaningful sound. The concert he gave with his percussion ensemble at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1943 marked the first step in his emergence as a leader of the American musical avant-garde.

In the following years, Cage turned to Zen Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies and concluded that all the activities that make up music must be seen as part of a single natural process. He came to regard all kinds of sounds as potentially musical, and he encouraged audiences to take note of all sonic phenomena, rather than only those elements selected by a composer. To this end he cultivated the principle of indeterminism in his music. He used a number of devices to ensure randomness and thus eliminate any element of personal taste on the part of the performer: unspecified instruments and numbers of performers, freedom of duration of sounds and entire pieces, inexact notation, and sequences of events determined by random means such as by consultation with the Chinese Yijing (I Ching). In his later works he extended these freedoms over other media, so that a performance of HPSCHD (completed 1969) might include a light show, slide projections, and costumed performers, as well as the 7 harpsichord soloists and 51 tape machines for which it was scored.


Among Cage’s best-known works are 4′33″ (Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds, 1952), a piece in which the performer or performers remain utterly silent onstage for that amount of time (although the amount of time is left to the determination of the performer); Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), for 12 randomly tuned radios, 24 performers, and conductor; the Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) for prepared piano; Fontana Mix (1958), a piece based on a series of programmed transparent cards that, when superimposed, give a graph for the random selection of electronic sounds; Cheap Imitation (1969), an “impression” of the music of Erik Satie; and Roaratorio (1979), an electronic composition utilizing thousands of words found in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake.

Cage published several books, including Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961) and M: Writings ’67–’72 (1973). His influence extended to such established composers as Earle Brown, Lejaren Hiller, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff. More broadly, his work was recognized as significant in the development of traditions ranging from minimalist and electronic music to performance art.

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John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.[1][2][3][4] He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.[5][6]

Cage's teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951.[7] The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text and decision-making tool, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life.[8] In a 1957 lecture, "Experimental Music", he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".[9]

Cage's best known work is the 1952 composition 4′33″, a piece performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing but be present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is intended to be the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.[10][11] The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. These include Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).[12]

Life

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1912–1931: early years

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Cage was born September 5, 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles.[13] His father, John Milton Cage Sr. (1886–1964), was an inventor, and his mother, Lucretia ("Crete") Harvey (1881–1968), worked intermittently as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times.[14] The family's roots were deeply American: in a 1976 interview, Cage mentioned that George Washington was assisted by an ancestor named John Cage in the task of surveying the Colony of Virginia.[15] Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who was "never happy",[16] while his father is perhaps best characterized by his inventions: sometimes idealistic, such as a diesel-fueled submarine that gave off exhaust bubbles, the senior Cage being uninterested in an undetectable submarine;[14] others revolutionary and against the scientific norms, such as the "electrostatic field theory" of the universe.[a] John Cage Sr. taught his son that "if someone says 'can't' that shows you what to do." In 1944–45 Cage wrote two small character pieces dedicated to his parents: Crete and Dad. The latter is a short lively piece that ends abruptly, while "Crete" is a slightly longer, mostly melodic contrapuntal work.[17]

Cage's first experiences with music were from private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and several relatives, particularly his aunt Phoebe Harvey James who introduced him to the piano music of the 19th century. He received first piano lessons when he was in the fourth grade at school, but although he liked music, he expressed more interest in sight reading than in developing virtuoso piano technique, and apparently was not thinking of composition.[18] During high school, one of his music teachers was Fannie Charles Dillon.[19] By 1928, though, Cage was convinced that he wanted to be a writer. He graduated that year from Los Angeles High School as a valedictorian,[20] having also in the spring given a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl proposing a day of quiet for all Americans. By being "hushed and silent," he said, "we should have the opportunity to hear what other people think," anticipating 4′33″ by more than thirty years.[21]

Cage enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont as a theology major in 1928. Often crossing disciplines again, though, he encountered at Pomona the work of artist Marcel Duchamp via Professor José Pijoan, of writer James Joyce via Don Sample, of philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy and of Henry Cowell.[19] In 1930 he dropped out, having come to believe that "college was of no use to a writer"[22] after an incident described in his 1991 autobiographical statement:

I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.[16]

Cage persuaded his parents that a trip to Europe would be more beneficial to a future writer than college studies.[23] He subsequently hitchhiked to Galveston and sailed to Le Havre, where he took a train to Paris.[24] Cage stayed in Europe for some 18 months, trying his hand at various forms of art. First, he studied Gothic and Greek architecture, but decided he was not interested enough in architecture to dedicate his life to it.[22] He then took up painting, poetry and music. It was in Europe that, encouraged by his teacher Lazare Lévy,[25] he first heard the music of contemporary composers (such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith) and finally got to know the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which he had not experienced before.

After several months in Paris, Cage's enthusiasm for America was revived after he read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass – he wanted to return immediately, but his parents, with whom he regularly exchanged letters during the entire trip, persuaded him to stay in Europe for a little longer and explore the continent.[26] Cage started traveling, visiting various places in France, Germany, and Spain, as well as Capri and, most importantly, Majorca, where he started composing.[27] His first compositions were created using dense mathematical formulas, but Cage was displeased with the results and left the finished pieces behind when he left.[28] Cage's association with theater also started in Europe: during a walk in Seville he witnessed, in his own words, "the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one's experience and producing enjoyment."[29]

1931–1936: apprenticeship

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Cage returned to the United States in 1931.[28] He went to Santa Monica, California, where he made a living partly by giving small, private lectures on contemporary art. He got to know various important figures of the Southern California art world, such as Richard Buhlig (who became his first composition teacher)[30] and arts patron Galka Scheyer.[22] By 1933, Cage decided to concentrate on music rather than painting. "The people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings", Cage later explained.[22] In 1933 he sent some of his compositions to Henry Cowell; the reply was a "rather vague letter",[31] in which Cowell suggested that Cage study with Arnold Schoenberg—Cage's musical ideas at the time included composition based on a 25-tone row, somewhat similar to Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.[32] Cowell also advised that, before approaching Schoenberg, Cage should take some preliminary lessons, and recommended Adolph Weiss, a former Schoenberg pupil.[33]

Following Cowell's advice, Cage travelled to New York City in 1933 and started studying with Weiss as well as taking lessons from Cowell himself at The New School.[30] He supported himself financially by taking up a job washing walls at a YWCA (World Young Women's Christian Association) in Brooklyn.[34] Cage's routine during that period was apparently very tiring, with just four hours of sleep on most nights, and four hours of composition every day starting at 4 am.[34][35] Several months later, still in 1933, Cage became sufficiently good at composition to approach Schoenberg.[b] He could not afford Schoenberg's price, and when he mentioned it, the older composer asked whether Cage would devote his life to music. After Cage replied that he would, Schoenberg offered to tutor him free of charge.[36]

Cage studied with Schoenberg in California: first at University of Southern California and then at University of California, Los Angeles, as well as privately.[30] The older composer became one of the biggest influences on Cage, who "literally worshipped him",[37] particularly as an example of how to live one's life being a composer.[35] The vow Cage gave, to dedicate his life to music, was apparently still important some 40 years later, when Cage "had no need for it [i.e. writing music]", he continued composing partly because of the promise he gave.[38] Schoenberg's methods and their influence on Cage are well documented by Cage himself in various lectures and writings. Particularly well-known is the conversation mentioned in the 1958 lecture Indeterminacy:

After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."[39]

Cage studied with Schoenberg for two years, but although he admired his teacher, he decided to leave after Schoenberg told the assembled students that he was trying to make it impossible for them to write music. Much later, Cage recounted the incident: "... When he said that, I revolted, not against him, but against what he had said. I determined then and there, more than ever before, to write music."[37] Although Schoenberg was not impressed with Cage's compositional abilities during these two years, in a later interview, where he initially said that none of his American pupils were interesting, he further stated in reference to Cage: "There was one ... of course he's not a composer, but he's an inventor—of genius."[37] Cage would later adopt the "inventor" moniker and deny that he was in fact a composer.[40]

At some point in 1934–35, during his studies with Schoenberg, Cage was working at his mother's arts and crafts shop, where he met artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff. She was an Alaskan-born daughter of a Russian priest; her work encompassed fine bookbinding, sculpture and collage. Although Cage was involved in relationships with Don Sample and with architect Rudolph Schindler's wife Pauline[19] when he met Xenia, he fell in love immediately. Cage and Kashevaroff were married in the desert at Yuma, Arizona, on June 7, 1935.[41]

1937–1949: modern dance and Eastern influences

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See also: Works for prepared piano by John Cage

The newly married couple first lived with Cage's parents in Pacific Palisades, then moved to Hollywood.[42] During 1936–38 Cage changed numerous jobs, including one that started his lifelong association with modern dance: dance accompanist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He produced music for choreographies and at one point taught a course on "Musical Accompaniments for Rhythmic Expression" at UCLA, with his aunt Phoebe.[43] It was during that time that Cage first started experimenting with unorthodox instruments, such as household items, metal sheets, and so on. This was inspired by Oskar Fischinger, who told Cage that "everything in the world has a spirit that can be released through its sound." Although Cage did not share the idea of spirits, these words inspired him to begin exploring the sounds produced by hitting various non-musical objects.[43][44]

In 1938, on Cowell's recommendation, Cage drove to San Francisco to find employment and to seek out fellow Cowell student and composer Lou Harrison. According to Cowell, the two composers had a shared interest in percussion and dance and would likely hit it off if introduced to one another. Indeed, the two immediately established a strong bond upon meeting and began a working relationship that continued for several years. Harrison soon helped Cage to secure a faculty member position at Mills College, teaching the same program as at UCLA, and collaborating with choreographer Marian van Tuyl. Several famous dance groups were present, and Cage's interest in modern dance grew further.[43] After several months he left and moved to Seattle, Washington, where he found work as composer and accompanist for choreographer Bonnie Bird at the Cornish College of the Arts. The Cornish School years proved to be a particularly important period in Cage's life. Aside from teaching and working as accompanist, Cage organized a percussion ensemble that toured the West Coast and brought the composer his first fame. His reputation was enhanced further with the invention of the prepared piano—a piano which has had its sound altered by objects placed on, beneath or between the strings—in 1940. This concept was originally intended for a performance staged in a room too small to include a full percussion ensemble. It was also at the Cornish School that Cage met several people who became lifelong friends, such as painter Mark Tobey and dancer Merce Cunningham. The latter was to become Cage's lifelong romantic partner and artistic collaborator.

Cage left Seattle in the summer of 1941 after the painter László Moholy-Nagy invited him to teach at the Chicago School of Design (what later became the IIT Institute of Design). The composer accepted partly because he hoped to find opportunities in Chicago, that were not available in Seattle, to organize a center for experimental music. These opportunities did not materialize. Cage taught at the Chicago School of Design and worked as accompanist and composer at the University of Chicago. At one point, his reputation as percussion composer landed him a commission from the Columbia Broadcasting System to compose a soundtrack for a radio play by Kenneth Patchen. The result, The City Wears a Slouch Hat, was received well, and Cage deduced that more important commissions would follow. Hoping to find these, he left Chicago for New York City in the spring of 1942.

In New York, the Cages first stayed with painter Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. Through them, Cage met important artists such as Piet Mondrian, André Breton, Jackson Pollock, and Marcel Duchamp, and many others. Guggenheim was very supportive: the Cages could stay with her and Ernst for any length of time, and she offered to organize a concert of Cage's music at the opening of her gallery, which included paying for transportation of Cage's percussion instruments from Chicago. After she learned that Cage secured another concert, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Guggenheim withdrew all support, and, even after the ultimately successful MoMA concert, Cage was left homeless, unemployed and penniless. The commissions he hoped for did not happen. He and Xenia spent the summer of 1942 with dancer Jean Erdman and her husband Joseph Campbell. Without the percussion instruments, Cage again turned to prepared piano, producing a substantial body of works for performances by various choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, who had moved to New York City several years earlier. Cage and Cunningham eventually became romantically involved, and Cage's marriage, already breaking up during the early 1940s, ended in divorce in 1945. Cunningham remained Cage's partner for the rest of his life. Cage also countered the lack of percussion instruments by writing, on one occasion, for voice and closed piano: the resulting piece, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942), quickly became popular and was performed by the celebrated duo of Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio.[45] In 1944, he appeared in Maya Deren's At Land, a 15-minute silent experimental film.

Like his personal life, Cage's artistic life went through a crisis in mid-1940s. The composer was experiencing a growing disillusionment with the idea of music as means of communication: the public rarely accepted his work, and Cage himself, too, had trouble understanding the music of his colleagues. In early 1946 Cage agreed to tutor Gita Sarabhai, an Indian musician who came to the US to study Western music. In return, he asked her to teach him about Indian music and philosophy.[46] Cage also attended, in late 1940s and early 1950s, D. T. Suzuki's lectures on Zen Buddhism,[47] and read further the works of Coomaraswamy.[30] The first fruits of these studies were works inspired by Indian concepts: Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, String Quartet in Four Parts, and others. Cage accepted the goal of music as explained to him by Sarabhai: "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences".[48]

Early in 1946, his former teacher Richard Buhlig arranged for Cage to meet Berlin-born pianist Grete Sultan, who had escaped from Nazi persecution to New York in 1941.[49] They became close, lifelong friends, and Cage later dedicated part of his Music for Piano and his monumental piano cycle Etudes Australes to her. In 1949, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.[50]

1950s: discovering chance

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After a 1949 performance at Carnegie Hall, New York, Cage received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, which enabled him to make a trip to Europe, where he met composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. More important was Cage's chance encounter with Morton Feldman in New York City in early 1950. Both composers attended a New York Philharmonic concert, where the orchestra performed Anton Webern's Symphony, op. 21, followed by a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Cage felt so overwhelmed by Webern's piece that he left before the Rachmaninoff; and in the lobby, he met Feldman, who was leaving for the same reason.[51] The two composers quickly became friends; some time later Cage, Feldman, Earle Brown, David Tudor and Cage's pupil Christian Wolff came to be referred to as "the New York school".[52][53]

In early 1951, Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the I Ching[54]—a Chinese classic text which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. This version of the I Ching was the first complete English translation and had been published by Wolff's father, Kurt Wolff of Pantheon Books in 1950. The I Ching is commonly used for divination, but for Cage it became a tool to compose using chance.[55] To compose a piece of music, Cage would come up with questions to ask the I Ching; the book would then be used in much the same way as it is used for divination. For Cage, this meant "imitating nature in its manner of operation".[56][57] His lifelong interest in sound itself culminated in an approach that yielded works in which sounds were free from the composer's will:

When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound ... I don't need sound to talk to me.[58]

Although Cage had used chance on a few earlier occasions, most notably in the third movement of Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950–51),[59] the I Ching opened new possibilities in this field for him. The first results of the new approach were Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radio receivers, and Music of Changes for piano. The latter work was written for David Tudor,[60] whom Cage met through Feldman—another friendship that lasted until Cage's death.[c] Tudor premiered most of Cage's works until the early 1960s, when he stopped performing on the piano and concentrated on composing music. The I Ching became Cage's standard tool for composition: he used it in practically every work composed after 1951, and eventually settled on a computer algorithm that calculated numbers in a manner similar to throwing coins for the I Ching.

Despite the fame Sonatas and Interludes earned him, and the connections he cultivated with American and European composers and musicians, Cage was quite poor. Although he still had an apartment at 326 Monroe Street (which he occupied since around 1946), his financial situation in 1951 worsened so much that while working on Music of Changes, he prepared a set of instructions for Tudor as to how to complete the piece in the event of his death.[61] Nevertheless, Cage managed to survive and maintained an active artistic life, giving lectures and performances, etc.

In 1952–1953 he completed another mammoth project—the Williams Mix, a piece of tape music, which Earle Brown and Morton Feldman helped to put together.[62] Also in 1952, Cage composed the piece that became his best-known and most controversial creation: 4′33″. The score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece—four minutes, thirty-three seconds—and is meant to be perceived as consisting of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Cage conceived "a silent piece" years earlier, but was reluctant to write it down; and indeed, the premiere (given by Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York) caused an uproar in the audience.[63] The reaction to 4′33″ was just a part of the larger picture: on the whole, it was the adoption of chance procedures that had disastrous consequences for Cage's reputation. The press, which used to react favorably to earlier percussion and prepared piano music, ignored his new works, and many valuable friendships and connections were lost. Pierre Boulez, who used to promote Cage's work in Europe, was opposed to Cage's particular approach to the use of chance, and so were other composers who came to prominence during the 1950s, e.g. Karlheinz Stockhausen.[64]

During this time Cage was also teaching at the avant-garde Black Mountain College just outside Asheville, North Carolina. Cage taught at the college in the summers of 1948 and 1952 and was in residence the summer of 1953. While at Black Mountain College in 1952, he organized what has been called the first "happening" (see discussion below) in the United States, later titled Theatre Piece No. 1, a multi-layered, multi-media performance event staged the same day as Cage conceived it that "that would greatly influence 1950s and 60s artistic practices". In addition to Cage, the participants included Cunningham and Tudor.[65]

From 1953 onward, Cage was busy composing music for modern dance, particularly Cunningham's dances (Cage's partner adopted chance too, out of fascination for the movement of the human body), as well as developing new methods of using chance, in a series of works he referred to as The Ten Thousand Things. In the summer of 1954 he moved out of New York and settled in Gate Hill Cooperative, a community in Stony Point, New York, where his neighbors included David Tudor, M. C. Richards, Karen Karnes, Stan VanDerBeek, and Sari Dienes. The composer's financial situation gradually improved: in late 1954 he and Tudor were able to embark on a European tour. From 1956 to 1961 Cage taught classes in experimental composition at The New School, and from 1956 to 1958 he also worked as an art director and designer of typography.[66] Among his works completed during the last years of the decade were Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58), a seminal work in the history of graphic notation,[67] and Variations I (1958).

1960s: fame

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Cage was affiliated with Wesleyan University and collaborated with members of its music department from the 1950s until his death in 1992. At the university, the philosopher, poet, and professor of classics Norman O. Brown befriended Cage, an association that proved fruitful to both.[68][69] In 1960 the composer was appointed a fellow on the faculty of the Center for Advanced Studies (now the Center for Humanities) in the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wesleyan,[70] where he started teaching classes in experimental music. In October 1961, Wesleyan University Press published Silence, a collection of Cage's lectures and writings on a wide variety of subjects, including the famous Lecture on Nothing that was composed using a complex time length scheme, much like some of Cage's music. Silence was Cage's first book of six but it remains his most widely read and influential.[d][30] In the early 1960s Cage began his lifelong association with C.F. Peters Corporation. Walter Hinrichsen, the president of the corporation, offered Cage an exclusive contract and instigated the publication of a catalog of Cage's works, which appeared in 1962.[66]

Edition Peters soon published a large number of scores by Cage, and this, together with the publication of Silence, led to much higher prominence for the composer than ever before—one of the positive consequences of this was that in 1965 Betty Freeman set up an annual grant for living expenses for Cage, to be issued from 1965 to his death.[71] By the mid-1960s, Cage was receiving so many commissions and requests for appearances that he was unable to fulfill them. This was accompanied by a busy touring schedule; consequently Cage's compositional output from that decade was scant.[30] After the orchestral Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), a work based on star charts, which was fully notated, Cage gradually shifted to, in his own words, "music (not composition)." The score of 0′00″, completed in 1962, originally comprised a single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action", and in the first performance the disciplined action was Cage writing that sentence. The score of Variations III (1962) abounds in instructions to the performers, but makes no references to music, musical instruments, or sounds.

Many of the Variations and other 1960s pieces were in fact "happenings", an art form established by Cage and his students in late 1950s. Cage's "Experimental Composition" classes at The New School have become legendary as an American source of Fluxus, an international network of artists, composers, and designers. The majority of his students had little or no background in music. Most were artists. They included Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, George Brecht, Ben Patterson, and Dick Higgins, as well as many others Cage invited unofficially. Famous pieces that resulted from the classes include George Brecht's Time Table Music and Al Hansen's Alice Denham in 48 Seconds.[72] As set forth by Cage, happenings were theatrical events that abandon the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration. Instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a "happening" is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and real life. The term "happenings" was coined by Allan Kaprow, one of his students, who defined it as a genre in the late fifties. Cage met Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with George Segal and invited him to join his class. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud's seminal treatise The Theatre and Its Double, and the happenings of this period can be viewed as a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement. In October 1960, Mary Bauermeister's Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik (Cage's friend and mentee), who in the course of his performance of Etude for Piano cut off Cage's tie and then poured a bottle of shampoo over the heads of Cage and Tudor.[73]

In 1967, Cage's book A Year from Monday was first published by Wesleyan University Press. Cage's parents died during the decade: his father in 1964,[74] and his mother in 1969. Cage had their ashes scattered in Ramapo Mountains, near Stony Point, and asked for the same to be done to him after his death.[75]

1969–1987: new departures

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Cage's work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious, not to mention socially utopian pieces, reflecting the mood of the era yet also his absorption of the writings of both Marshall McLuhan, on the effects of new media, and R. Buckminster Fuller, on the power of technology to promote social change. HPSCHD (1969), a gargantuan and long-running multimedia work made in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, incorporated the mass superimposition of seven harpsichords playing chance-determined excerpts from the works of Cage, Hiller, and a potted history of canonical classics, with 52 tapes of computer-generated sounds, 6,400 slides of designs, many supplied by NASA, and shown from sixty-four slide projectors, with 40 motion-picture films. The piece was initially rendered in a five-hour performance at the University of Illinois in 1969, in which the audience arrived after the piece had begun and left before it ended, wandering freely around the auditorium in the time for which they were there.[76]

Also in 1969, Cage produced the first fully notated work in years: Cheap Imitation for piano. The piece is a chance-controlled reworking of Erik Satie's Socrate, and, as both listeners and Cage himself noted, openly sympathetic to its source. Although Cage's affection for Satie's music was well-known, it was highly unusual for him to compose a personal work, one in which the composer is present. When asked about this apparent contradiction, Cage replied: "Obviously, Cheap Imitation lies outside of what may seem necessary in my work in general, and that's disturbing. I'm the first to be disturbed by it."[77] Cage's fondness for the piece resulted in a recording—a rare occurrence, since Cage disliked making recordings of his music—made in 1976.[78] Overall, Cheap Imitation marked a major change in Cage's music: he turned again to writing fully notated works for traditional instruments, and tried out several new approaches, such as improvisation, which he previously discouraged, but was able to use in works from the 1970s, such as Child of Tree (1975).[79]

Opening bars of Cheap Imitation (1969)
Duration: 40 seconds.
Performed by the composer in 1976, shortly before he had to retire from performing
Problems playing this file? See media help.

Cheap Imitation became the last work Cage performed in public himself. Arthritis had troubled Cage since 1960, and by the early 1970s his hands were painfully swollen and rendered him unable to perform.[80] Nevertheless, he still played Cheap Imitation during the 1970s,[81] before finally having to give up performing. Preparing manuscripts also became difficult: before, published versions of pieces were done in Cage's calligraphic script; now, manuscripts for publication had to be completed by assistants. Matters were complicated further by David Tudor's departure from performing, which happened in the early 1970s. Tudor decided to concentrate on composition instead, and so Cage, for the first time in two decades, had to start relying on commissions from other performers, and their respective abilities. Such performers included Grete Sultan, Paul Zukofsky, Margaret Leng Tan, and many others. Aside from music, Cage continued writing books of prose and poetry (mesostics). M was first published by Wesleyan University Press in 1973. In January 1978 Cage was invited by Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press to engage in printmaking, and Cage would go on to produce series of prints every year until his death; these, together with some late watercolors, constitute the largest portion of his extant visual art. In 1979 Cage's Empty Words was first published by Wesleyan University Press.

1987–1992: final years and death

[edit]
See also: Number Pieces

In 1987, Cage completed a piece called Two, for flute and piano, dedicated to performers Roberto Fabbriciani and Carlo Neri. The title referred to the number of performers needed; the music consisted of short notated fragments to be played at any tempo within the indicated time constraints. Cage went on to write some forty such Number Pieces, as they came to be known, one of the last being Eighty (1992, premiered in Munich on October 28, 2011), usually employing a variant of the same technique. The process of composition, in many of the later Number Pieces, was simple selection of pitch range and pitches from that range, using chance procedures;[30] the music has been linked to Cage's anarchic leanings.[82] One11 (i.e., the eleventh piece for a single performer), completed in early 1992, was Cage's first and only foray into film. Cage conceived his last musical work with Michael Bach Bachtischa: "ONE13" for violoncello with curved bow and three loudspeakers, which was published years later.

Another new direction, also taken in 1987, was opera: Cage produced five operas, all sharing the same title Europera, in 1987–91. Europeras I and II require greater forces than III, IV and V, which are on a chamber scale. They were commissioned by the Frankfurt Opera to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday, and according to music critic Mark Swed, they took "an enormous effort on the composer's part–requiring two full-time assistants and two computers humming day and night."[83] These pieces caused quite a stir in the world of opera at the time with their unconventional methods for staging and sequencing. Many standard pieces of operatic repertoire were used, but not in any preset order; rather, they were selected by chance, meaning no two performances were exactly alike. Many of those who were to be a part of these performances refused to participate, citing the impossibility of the requests Cage was making. Days before Europas 1 & 2 were to be premiered,  Frankfurt's opera house burned down, setting into motion a series of setbacks leading to a theatrical run met with mixed reactions, including a performance so bad that Cage penned a letter to his musicians criticizing their interpretation of his composition.[83]

John Cage (left) and Michael Bach in Assisi, Italy, 1992

In the course of the 1980s, Cage's health worsened progressively. He suffered not only from arthritis, but also from sciatica and arteriosclerosis. He had a stroke that left the movement of his left leg restricted, and, in 1985, broke an arm. During this time, Cage pursued a macrobiotic diet.[84] Nevertheless, ever since arthritis started plaguing him, the composer was aware of his age, and, as biographer David Revill observed, "the fire which he began to incorporate in his visual work in 1985 is not only the fire he has set aside for so long—the fire of passion—but also fire as transitoriness and fragility." On August 11, 1992, while preparing evening tea for himself and Cunningham, Cage had another stroke. He was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, where he died on the morning of August 12.[85] He was 79.[2]

According to his wishes, Cage's body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Ramapo Mountains, near Stony Point, New York, at the same place where he had scattered the ashes of his parents.[75] The composer's death occurred only weeks before a celebration of his 80th birthday organized in Frankfurt by composer Walter Zimmermann and musicologist Stefan Schaedler.[2] The event went ahead as planned, including a performance of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra by David Tudor and Ensemble Modern. Merce Cunningham died of natural causes in July 2009.[86]

Music

[edit]
See also: List of compositions by John Cage

Early works, rhythmic structure, and new approaches to harmony

[edit]

Cage's first completed pieces are currently lost. According to the composer, the earliest works were very short pieces for piano, composed using complex mathematical procedures and lacking in "sensual appeal and expressive power."[87] Cage then started producing pieces by improvising and writing down the results, until Richard Buhlig stressed to him the importance of structure. Most works from the early 1930s, such as Sonata for Clarinet (1933) and Composition for 3 Voices (1934), are highly chromatic and betray Cage's interest in counterpoint. Around the same time, the composer also developed a type of a tone row technique with 25-note rows.[88] After studies with Schoenberg, who never taught dodecaphony to his students, Cage developed another tone row technique, in which the row was split into short motives, which would then be repeated and transposed according to a set of rules. This approach was first used in Two Pieces for Piano (c. 1935), and then, with modifications, in larger works such as Metamorphosis and Five Songs (both 1938).

Rhythmic proportions in Sonata III of Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano

Soon after Cage started writing percussion music and music for modern dance, he started using a technique that placed the rhythmic structure of the piece into the foreground. In Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) there are four large sections of 16, 17, 18, and 19 bars, and each section is divided into four subsections, the first three of which were all 5 bars long. First Construction (in Metal) (1939) expands on the concept: there are five sections of 4, 3, 2, 3, and 4 units respectively. Each unit contains 16 bars, and is divided the same way: 4 bars, 3 bars, 2 bars, etc. Finally, the musical content of the piece is based on sixteen motives.[89] Such "nested proportions", as Cage called them, became a regular feature of his music throughout the 1940s. The technique was elevated to great complexity in later pieces such as Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (1946–48), in which many proportions used non-integer numbers (1¼, ¾, 1¼, ¾, 1½, and 1½ for Sonata I, for example),[90] or A Flower, a song for voice and closed piano, in which two sets of proportions are used simultaneously.[91]

In late 1940s, Cage started developing further methods of breaking away with traditional harmony. For instance, in String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) Cage first composed a number of gamuts: chords with fixed instrumentation. The piece progresses from one gamut to another. In each instance the gamut was selected only based on whether it contains the note necessary for the melody, and so the rest of the notes do not form any directional harmony.[30] Concerto for prepared piano (1950–51) used a system of charts of durations, dynamics, melodies, etc., from which Cage would choose using simple geometric patterns.[30] The last movement of the concerto was a step towards using chance procedures, which Cage adopted soon afterwards.[92]

Chance

[edit]
I Ching divination involves obtaining a hexagram by random generation (such as tossing coins), then reading the chapter associated with that hexagram.

A chart system was also used (along with nested proportions) for the large piano work Music of Changes (1951), only here material would be selected from the charts by using the I Ching. All of Cage's music since 1951 was composed using chance procedures, most commonly using the I Ching. For example, works from Music for Piano were based on paper imperfections: the imperfections themselves provided pitches, coin tosses and I Ching hexagram numbers were used to determine the accidentals, clefs, and playing techniques.[93] A whole series of works was created by applying chance operations, i.e. the I Ching, to star charts: Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), and a series of etudes: Etudes Australes (1974–75), Freeman Etudes (1977–90), and Etudes Boreales (1978).[94] Cage's etudes are all extremely difficult to perform, a characteristic dictated by Cage's social and political views: the difficulty would ensure that "a performance would show that the impossible is not impossible"[95]—this being Cage's answer to the notion that solving the world's political and social problems is impossible.[96] Cage described himself as an anarchist, and was influenced by Henry David Thoreau.[e]

Another series of works applied chance procedures to pre-existing music by other composers: Cheap Imitation (1969; based on Erik Satie), Some of "The Harmony of Maine" (1978; based on Belcher), and Hymns and Variations (1979). In these works, Cage would borrow the rhythmic structure of the originals and fill it with pitches determined through chance procedures, or just replace some of the originals' pitches.[98] Yet another series of works, the so-called Number Pieces, all completed during the last five years of the composer's life, make use of time brackets: the score consists of short fragments with indications of when to start and to end them (e.g. from anywhere between 1′15" and 1′45", and to anywhere from 2′00" to 2′30").[99]

Cage's method of using the I Ching was far from simple randomization. The procedures varied from composition to composition, and were usually complex. For example, in the case of Cheap Imitation, the exact questions asked to the I Ching were these:

  1. Which of the seven modes, if we take as modes the seven scales beginning on white notes and remaining on white notes, which of those am I using?
  2. Which of the twelve possible chromatic transpositions am I using?
  3. For this phrase for which this transposition of this mode will apply, which note am I using of the seven to imitate the note that Satie wrote?[100]

In another example of late music by Cage, Etudes Australes, the compositional procedure involved placing a transparent strip on the star chart, identifying the pitches from the chart, transferring them to paper, then asking the I Ching which of these pitches were to remain single, and which should become parts of aggregates (chords), and the aggregates were selected from a table of some 550 possible aggregates, compiled beforehand.[94][101]

Finally, some of Cage's works, particularly those completed during the 1960s, feature instructions to the performer, rather than fully notated music. The score of Variations I (1958) presents the performer with six transparent squares, one with points of various sizes, five with five intersecting lines. The performer combines the squares and uses lines and points as a coordinate system, in which the lines are axes of various characteristics of the sounds, such as lowest frequency, simplest overtone structure, etc.[102] Some of Cage's graphic scores (e.g. Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Fontana Mix (both 1958)) present the performer with similar difficulties. Still other works from the same period consist just of text instructions. The score of 0′00″ (1962; also known as 4′33″ No. 2) consists of a single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." The first performance had Cage write that sentence.[103]

Musicircus (1967) simply invites the performers to assemble and play together. The first Musicircus featured multiple performers and groups in a large space who were all to commence and stop playing at two particular time periods, with instructions on when to play individually or in groups within these two periods. The result was a mass superimposition of many different musics on top of one another as determined by chance distribution, producing an event with a specifically theatric feel. Many Musicircuses have subsequently been held, and continue to occur even after Cage's death. The English National Opera (ENO) became the first opera company to hold a Cage Musicircus on March 3, 2012, at the London Coliseum.[104][105] The ENO's Musicircus featured artists including Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and composer Michael Finnissy alongside ENO music director Edward Gardner, the ENO Community Choir, ENO Opera Works singers, and a collective of professional and amateur talents performing in the bars and front of house at London's Coliseum Opera House.[106]

This concept of circus was to remain important to Cage throughout his life and featured strongly in such pieces as Roaratorio, an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), a many-tiered rendering in sound of both his text Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake, and traditional musical and field recordings made around Ireland. The piece was based on James Joyce's famous novel, Finnegans Wake, which was one of Cage's favorite books, and one from which he derived texts for several more of his works.

Improvisation

[edit]

Since chance procedures were used by Cage to eliminate the composer's and the performer's likes and dislikes from music, Cage disliked the concept of improvisation, which is inevitably linked to the performer's preferences. In a number of works beginning in the 1970s, he found ways to incorporate improvisation. In Child of Tree (1975) and Branches (1976) the performers are asked to use certain species of plants as instruments, for example the cactus. The structure of the pieces is determined through the chance of their choices, as is the musical output; the performers had no knowledge of the instruments. In Inlets (1977) the performers play large water-filled conch shells – by carefully tipping the shell several times, it is possible to achieve a bubble forming inside, which produced sound. Yet, as it is impossible to predict when this would happen, the performers had to continue tipping the shells – as a result the performance was dictated by pure chance.[107]

Visual art, writings, and other activities

[edit]
Variations III, No. 14, a 1992 print by Cage from a series of 57

Although Cage started painting in his youth, he gave it up to concentrate on music instead. His first mature visual project, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, dates from 1969. The work comprises two lithographs and a group of what Cage called plexigrams: silk screen printing on plexiglas panels. The panels and the lithographs all consist of bits and pieces of words in different typefaces, all governed by chance operations.[108]

From 1978 to his death Cage worked at Crown Point Press, producing series of prints every year. The earliest project completed there was the etching Score Without Parts (1978), created from fully notated instructions, and based on various combinations of drawings by Henry David Thoreau. This was followed, the same year, by Seven Day Diary, which Cage drew with his eyes closed, but which conformed to a strict structure developed using chance operations. Finally, Thoreau's drawings informed the last works produced in 1978, Signals.[109]

Between 1979 and 1982 Cage produced a number of large series of prints: Changes and Disappearances (1979–80), On the Surface (1980–82), and Déreau (1982). These were the last works in which he used engraving.[110] In 1983 he started using various unconventional materials such as cotton batting, foam, etc., and then used stones and fire (Eninka, Variations, Ryoanji, etc.) to create his visual works.[111] In 1988–1990 he produced watercolors at the Mountain Lake Workshop.

The only film Cage produced was one of the Number Pieces, One11, commissioned by composer and film director Henning Lohner who worked with Cage to produce and direct the 90-minute monochrome film. It was completed only weeks before his death in 1992. One11 consists entirely of images of chance-determined play of electric light. It premiered in Cologne, Germany, on September 19, 1992, accompanied by the live performance of the orchestra piece 103.

Throughout his adult life, Cage was also active as lecturer and writer. Some of his lectures were included in several books he published, the first of which was Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961). Silence included not only simple lectures, but also texts executed in experimental layouts, and works such as Lecture on Nothing (1949), which were composed in rhythmic structures. Subsequent books also featured different types of content, from lectures on music to poetry—Cage's mesostics.

Cage was also an avid amateur mycologist.[112] In the fall of 1969, he gave a lecture on the subject of edible mushrooms at the University of California, Davis as part of his "Music in Dialogue" course.[113] He co-founded the New York Mycological Society with four friends,[66] and his mycology collection is presently housed by the Special Collections department of the McHenry Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Reception and influence

[edit]

Cage's pre-chance works, particularly pieces from the late 1940s such as Sonatas and Interludes, earned critical acclaim: the Sonatas were performed at Carnegie Hall in 1949. Cage's adoption of chance operations in 1951 cost him a number of friendships and led to numerous criticisms from fellow composers. Adherents of serialism such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen dismissed indeterminate music; Boulez, who was once on friendly terms with Cage, criticized him for "adoption of a philosophy tinged with Orientalism that masks a basic weakness in compositional technique."[114] Prominent critics of serialism, such as the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, were similarly hostile towards Cage: for Xenakis, the adoption of chance in music was "an abuse of language and ... an abrogation of a composer's function."[115]

An article by teacher and critic Michael Steinberg, Tradition and Responsibility, criticized avant-garde music in general:

The rise of music that is totally without social commitment also increases the separation between composer and public, and represents still another form of departure from tradition. The cynicism with which this particular departure seems to have been made is perfectly symbolized in John Cage's account of a public lecture he had given: "Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen." While Mr. Cage's famous silent piece [i.e. 4′33″], or his Landscapes for a dozen radio receivers may be of little interest as music, they are of enormous importance historically as representing the complete abdication of the artist's power.[116]

Cage's aesthetic position was criticized by, among others, prominent writer and critic Douglas Kahn. In his 1999 book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Kahn acknowledged the influence Cage had on culture, but noted that "one of the central effects of Cage's battery of silencing techniques was a silencing of the social."[117]

While much of Cage's work remains controversial,[118][119] his influence on countless composers, artists, and writers is notable.[120] After Cage introduced chance procedures to his works, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis remained critical, yet all adopted chance procedures in some of their works (although in a much more restricted manner); and Stockhausen's piano writing in his later Klavierstücke was influenced by Cage's Music of Changes and David Tudor.[121] Other composers who adopted chance procedures in their works included Witold Lutosławski,[122] Mauricio Kagel,[123] and many others. Music in which some of the composition and/or performance is left to chance was labelled aleatoric music—a term popularized by Pierre Boulez. Helmut Lachenmann's work was influenced by Cage's work with extended techniques.[124]

Cage's rhythmic structure experiments and his interest in sound influenced a number of composers, starting at first with his close American associates Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff (and other American composers, such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass), and then spreading to Europe.[125][126][127] For example, many composers of the English experimental school acknowledge his influence:[128] Michael Parsons, Christopher Hobbs, John White,[129] Gavin Bryars, who studied under Cage briefly,[130] and Howard Skempton.[131] The Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu has also cited Cage's influence.[132] In 1986, he received an honorary doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts.[133] Cage is a 1989 Kyoto Prize Laureate; the prize was established by Kazuo Inamori.[134] The John Cage Award was endowed and established in 1992 by Foundation for Contemporary Arts in honor of the late composer, with recipients including Meredith Monk, Robert Ashley, and Toshi Ichiyanagi.[135]

Following Cage's death Simon Jeffes, founder of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, composed a piece entitled "CAGE DEAD", using a melody based on the notes contained in the title, in the order they appear: C, A, G, E, D, E, A and D.[136]

Cage's influence was also acknowledged by rock acts such as Sonic Youth (who performed some of the Number Pieces[137]) and Stereolab (who named a song after Cage[138]), composer and rock and jazz guitarist Frank Zappa,[139] and various noise music artists and bands: musicologist Paul Hegarty traced the origin of noise music to 4′33″.[140] The development of electronic music was also influenced by Cage: in the mid-1970s Brian Eno's label Obscure Records released works by Cage.[141] Prepared piano, which Cage popularized, is featured heavily on Aphex Twin's 2001 album Drukqs.[142] Cage's work as musicologist helped popularize Erik Satie's music,[143][144] and his friendship with Abstract expressionist artists such as Robert Rauschenberg helped introduce his ideas into visual art. Cage's ideas also found their way into sound design: for example, Academy Award-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom cited Cage's work as a major influence.[145] Radiohead undertook a composing and performing collaboration with Cunningham's dance troupe in 2003 because the music-group's leader Thom Yorke considered Cage one of his "all-time art heroes".[146] In the The Tragically Hip's 2000 song Tiger the Lion from their album Music @ Work, lyricist Gord Downie refers to Cage and his theories. [147]

Centenary commemoration

[edit]

In 2012, among a wide range of American and international centennial celebrations,[148][149] an eight-day festival was held in Washington DC, with venues found notably more among the city's art museums and universities than performance spaces. Earlier in the centennial year, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas presented Cage's Song Books with the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York.[150][151] Another celebration came, for instance, in Darmstadt, Germany, which in July 2012 renamed its central station the John Cage Railway Station during the term of its annual new-music courses.[19] At the Ruhrtriennale in Germany, Heiner Goebbels staged a production of Europeras 1 & 2 in a 36,000 sq ft converted factory and commissioned a production of Lecture on Nothing created and performed by Robert Wilson.[152] Jacaranda Music had four concerts planned in Santa Monica, California, for the centennial week.[153][154] John Cage Day was the name given to several events held during 2012 to mark the centenary of his birth.

A 2012 project was curated by Juraj Kojs to celebrate the centenary of Cage's birth, titled On Silence: Homage to Cage. It consisted of 13 commissioned works created by composers from around the globe such as Kasia Glowicka, Adrian Knight and Henry Vega, each being 4 minutes and 33 seconds long in honor of Cage's famous 1952 opus, 4′33″. The program was supported by the Foundation for Emerging Technologies and Arts, Laura Kuhn and the John Cage Trust.[155]

In a homage to Cage's dance work, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in July 2012 "performed an engrossing piece called 'Story/Time'. It was modeled on Cage's 1958 work 'Indeterminacy', in which [Cage and then Jones, respectively,] sat alone onstage, reading aloud ... series of one-minute stories [they]'d written. Dancers from Jones's company performed as [Jones] read."[146]

John Cage

Archives

[edit]
  • The archive of the John Cage Trust is held at Bard College in upstate New York.[156]
  • The John Cage Music Manuscript Collection held by the Music Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts contains most of the composer's musical manuscripts, including sketches, worksheets, realizations, and unfinished works.
  • The John Cage Papers are held in the Special Collections and Archives department of Wesleyan University's Olin Library in Middletown, Connecticut. They contain manuscripts, interviews, fan mail, and ephemera. Other material includes clippings, gallery and exhibition catalogs, a collection of Cage's books and serials, posters, objects, exhibition and literary announcement postcards, and brochures from conferences and other organizations
  • The John Cage Collection at Northwestern University in Illinois contains the composer's correspondence, ephemera, and the Notations collection.[157]
  • The John Cage Materials are held within the Oral History of American Music (OHAM) collection of the Irving S. Gilmore Library at Yale University.[158]

See also

[edit]

Notes, references, sources

[edit]

Notes

[edit]
  1. ^ Cage quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 1–2. Cage mentions a working model of the universe that his father had built, and that the scientists who saw it could not explain how it worked and refused to believe it.
  2. ^ Different sources give different details of their first meeting. Pritchett, Kuhn & Garrett 2012, in Grove, imply that Cage met Schoenberg in New York City: "Cage followed Schoenberg to Los Angeles in 1934". In a 1976 interview quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 5, Cage mentions that he "went to see him [Schoenberg] in Los Angeles."
  3. ^ Recent research has shown that Cage may have met Tudor almost a decade earlier, in 1942, through Jean Erdman: Gann, Kyle (2008). "Cleaning Up a Life". artsjournal.com. Retrieved August 4, 2009.
  4. ^ Technically, it was his second, for Cage previously collaborated with Kathleen Hoover on a biographical volume on Virgil Thomson which was published in 1959.
  5. ^ Cage self-identified as an anarchist in a 1985 interview: "I'm an anarchist. I don't know whether the adjective is pure and simple, or philosophical, or what, but I don't like government! And I don't like institutions! And I don't have any confidence in even good institutions."[97]

Citations

[edit]
  1. ^ Pritchett, Kuhn & Garrett 2012 "He has had a greater impact on music in the 20th century than any other American composer."
  2. ^ Jump up to:a b c Kozinn, Allan (August 13, 1992). "John Cage, 79, a Minimalist Enchanted With Sound, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved July 21, 2007.
  3. ^ Leonard, George J. (1995). Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage. University of Chicago Press. p. 120. ISBN 978-0-226-47253-9. ... when Harvard University Press called him, in a 1990 book advertisement, 'without a doubt the most influential composer of the last half-century', amazingly, that was too modest.
  4. ^ Greene, David Mason (2007). Greene's Biographical Encyclopedia of Composers. Reproducing Piano Roll Fnd. p. 1407. ISBN 978-0-385-14278-6. ... John Cage is probably the most influential ... of all American composers to date.
  5. ^ Perloff & Junkerman 1994, 93.
  6. ^ Bernstein & Hatch 2001, 43–45.
  7. ^ Lejeunne 2012, 185–189.
  8. ^ John Cage – Music of Changes. By David Ryan, taniachen.com
  9. ^ Cage 1973, 12.
  10. ^ Kostelanetz 2003, 69–70.
  11. ^ Reviews cited in Fetterman 1996, 69
  12. ^ Nicholls 2002, 80: "Most critics agree that Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) is the finest composition of Cage's early period."
  13. ^ Mark Swed (August 31, 2012), John Cage's genius an L.A. story Los Angeles Times.
  14. ^ Jump up to:a b Nicholls 2002, 4
  15. ^ Cage quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 1. For details on Cage's ancestry, see, for example, Nicholls 2002, 4–6.
  16. ^ Jump up to:a b Cage, John (1991). "An Autobiographical Statement". Southwest Review. Archived from the original on February 26, 2007. Retrieved March 14, 2007.
  17. ^ Recording and notes: John Cage – Complete Piano Music Vol. 7: Pieces 1933–1950. Steffen Schleiermacher (piano). MDG 613 0789-2.
  18. ^ Kostelanetz 2003, 2.
  19. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Swed, Mark, "John Cage's genius an L.A. story", Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2012. Retrieved September 2, 2012.
  20. ^ Nicholls 2002, 21.
  21. ^ Ross, Alex (September 27, 2010). "Searching for Silence: John Cage's art of noise". The New Yorker. Retrieved July 21, 2020.
  22. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Kostelanetz 2003, 4
  23. ^ Nicholls 2002, 8.
  24. ^ Perloff & Junkerman 1994, 79.
  25. ^ John Cage, National Inter-Collegiate Arts Conference, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie (New York), February 28, 1948.
  26. ^ Perloff & Junkerman 1994, 80.
  27. ^ Nicholls 2002, 22.
  28. ^ Jump up to:a b Perloff & Junkerman 1994, 81
  29. ^ Cage quoted in Perloff & Junkerman 1994, 81.
  30. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i Pritchett, Kuhn & Garrett 2012
  31. ^ Cage quoted in Nicholls 2002, 24.
  32. ^ Kostelanetz 2003, 61.
  33. ^ Nicholls 2002, 24.
  34. ^ Jump up to:a b Kostelanetz 2003, 7
  35. ^ Jump up to:a b Pritchett 1993, 9
  36. ^ This conversation was recounted many times by Cage himself: see Silence, p. 261; A Year from Monday, p. 44; interviews quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 5, 105; etc..
  37. ^ Jump up to:a b c Kostelanetz 2003, 6
  38. ^ Cage interview quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 105.
  39. ^ Cage 1973, 260.
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  41. ^ For details on Cage's first meeting with Xenia, see Kostelanetz 2003, 7–8; for details on Cage's homosexual relationship with Don Sample, an American he met in Europe, as well as details on the Cage-Kashevaroff marriage, see Perloff & Junkerman 1994, 81, 86.
  42. ^ Perloff & Junkerman 1994, 86.
  43. ^ Jump up to:a b c Revill 1993, 55
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  58. ^ John Cage, in an interview with Miroslav Sebestik, 1991. From: Listen, documentary by Miroslav Sebestik. ARTE France Développement, 2003.
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  101. ^ Kostelanetz 2003, 92.
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  103. ^ Pritchett 1993, 144–146.
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John Cage, 79, a Minimalist Enchanted With Sound, Dies

By Allan Kozinn

John Cage, 79, a Minimalist Enchanted With Sound, Dies
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John Cage, the prolific and influential composer whose Minimalist works have long been a driving force in the world of music, dance and art, died yesterday at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan. He was 79 years old and lived in Manhattan.

He died of a stroke, a hospital spokesman said.

The influence of Mr. Cage, who was also a writer and philosopher, spread far beyond the musical world.

He was a central influence on the work of the choreography of Merce Cunningham, whom he had known since they were students at the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle more than 50 years ago. It was Mr. Cage who persuaded Mr. Cunningham to start his own dance company, with which Mr. Cage toured as composer, accompanist and music director. He was also an influence on the artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who were his friends, and on several generations of performance artists. With Three in One

In 1989, when the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in London brought together pages from Mr. Cage's 1958 "Concert for Piano and Orchestra," videotape of Mr. Cunningham's choreography and a collection of Mr. Johns's works in a show called "Dancers on a Plane: Cage, Cunningham, Johns," John Russell wrote in The New York Times about Mr. Cage's centrality in this constellation: "There was never a manifesto, a statement of position, a 'momentous' interview. He just does it, and the others do what they do, and in ways that everybody can sense and nobody can quite explain, the interaction of these three has consistently brought about astonishing results."

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In the music world, of course, Mr. Cage's influence was extremely far-reaching. He started a revolution by proposing that composers could jettison the musical language that had evolved over the last seven centuries, and in doing so he opened the door to Minimalism, performance art and virtually every other branch of the musical avant-garde. Composers as different in style from one another -- and from Mr. Cage -- as Philip Glass, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Frederic Rzewski have cited Mr. Cage as a beacon that helped light their own paths.

"Perhaps no one living artist has such a great influence over such a diverse lot of important people," Richard Kostelanetz, a writer who edited several books about Mr. Cage, wrote in a New York Times Magazine article in 1967. "Nowadays, even those critics who disagree with him respect his willingness to pursue his ideas to their 'mad' conclusions, and he was impoverished for too many years for anyone seriously to doubt his integrity."

In a career that began in the 1930's, Mr. Cage composed hundreds of works, ranging from early pieces that were organized according to the conventional rules of harmony and thematic development, to late pieces that defied those rules and were composed using what he called "chance" processes.

He composed for every imaginable kind of instrument, from standard orchestral strings to "prepared" pianos, altered by putting nails, paper, wood, rubber bands or other objects between their strings to make them sound percussive and otherworldly. He wrote electronic and tape works, and works that involved only spoken texts. His often impish scoring, in fact, might include radios, toys, the sounds of water being sipped or vegetables being chopped. On the Nature Of Sound

His "Europera 5" -- sections of which are to be performed this weekend and next as part of a Museum of Modern Art Summergarden series in midtown Manhattan devoted to Mr. Cage's work -- juxtaposes 19th-century operatic arias, instrumental music by Mr. Cage, radio broadcasts and silent television pictures. And one of his most famous and provocative pieces, "4'33"," is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, divided into three movements. Indeed, Mr. Cage considered virtually every kind of sound potentially musical.

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"I think it is true that sounds are, of their nature, harmonious," he told an interviewer last month, "and I would extend that to noise. There is no noise, only sound. I haven't heard any sounds that I consider something I don't want to hear again, with the exception of sounds that frighten us or make us aware of pain. I don't like meaningful sound. If sound is meaningless, I'm all for it."

Not surprisingly, Mr. Cage, his music and his theories of composition have always inspired debate. Traditionalists have dismissed him as a prankster, a charlatan or an anarchist, and although performances of his music take place uneventfully today, there were times in the 1960's when his works evoked angry responses. At a New York Philharmonic performance of "Eclipticalis With Winter Music," in 1964, for example, a third of the audience walked out and members of the orchestra hissed the composer.

"I do what I feel it is necessary to do," he told an interviewer. "My necessity comes from my sense of invention, and I try not to repeat the things I already know about."

Mr. Cage was, in fact, the son of an inventor, and if there is a single thread running through his compositions and books, it is a sense of constant innovation, improvisation and exploration. Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he studied and whose rigorous 12-tone style inhabits an end of the contemporary music continuum opposite the place occupied by Mr. Cage, once described him as "not a composer but an inventor of genius," a quotation that Mr. Cage always said pleased him.

John Milton Cage Jr. was born on Sept. 5, 1912, in Los Angeles, and spent part of his childhood in Detroit and Ann Arbor, Mich., before moving back to California. An entrepreneur from the start, he had his own weekly radio show on KNX in Los Angeles when he was 12 years old. He had started to study the piano by then, and his programs featured his own performances and those by other musicians in his Boy Scout troop. He graduated from Los Angeles High School as class valedictorian.

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He was ambivalent about his musical studies at first. He did not regard himself as a virtuoso pianist, and throughout his life he frankly spoke and wrote of his lack of traditional musical skills, going as far as proclaiming, in his book "A Year From Monday": "I can't keep a tune. In fact I have no talent for music."

In 1930, after two years at Pomona College, Mr. Cage went to Paris where he briefly worked for Erno Goldfinger, an architect with ties to Marcel Duschamp and other Dadaists whose work would later influence him. He also threw himself into the study of contemporary piano works he had heard at a performance by the American pianist John Kirkpatrick. He painted and wrote poetry, and it was during a visit to Majorca during this first European sojourn that he composed his first piano pieces. Working as a Cook And Gardener

The European trip was followed in 1931 by a drive across the United States. When he returned to California, he took jobs as a cook and gardener. He also began giving lectures on modern art, keeping a step ahead of his subject by doing research at the Los Angeles Public Library.

At around this time, he also was becoming increasingly interested in the music of Schoenberg, who had jettisoned the hierarchical system of tonal harmony that had prevailed in Western music, and replaced it with a system in which the 12 tones of the scale were given equal weight. This notion appealed to Mr. Cage, and in 1933, after reading that the pianist Richard Buhlig performed some of Schoenberg's music, he sought Buhlig out and began to study with him. He also developed a harmonic system of his own, distinct from Schoenberg's, but similar in spirit, and used it to compose a Sonata for Two Voices and a Sonata for Clarinet.

Later in 1933, Mr. Cage traveled to New York City to study harmony and composition with Adolph Weiss. He also studied Oriental and folk music at the New School for Social Research with the iconoclastic composer Henry Cowell.

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By the time Mr. Cage returned to California, late in 1934, Schoenberg had left Europe, where the Nazis had declared his music decadent, and had accepted a teaching post at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles. Schoenberg agreed to teach Mr. Cage counterpoint, harmony and analysis free of charge, as long as Mr. Cage promised to consecrate himself to music.

"Schoenberg was a marvelous person," Mr. Cage said last month. "He gave his students little comfort. When we followed the rules in writing counterpoint, he would say, 'Why don't you take a little liberty?' And when we took liberties, he would say, 'Don't you know the rules?' "

But Schoenberg showed little interest in Mr. Cage's own work. He declined to look at his pieces, even such formal exercises as fugues. And when Mr. Cage's early percussion works were performed, Schoenberg invariably said he was not able to attend.

Eventually, Mr. Cage drifted toward the world of dance. In 1937, he joined the modern dance ensemble at the University of California at Los Angeles as an accompanist and composer, and he formed his own ensemble to play his early percussion works. In 1937, he moved to Seattle, where he worked as composer and accompanist for Bonnie Baird's dance classes at the Cornish School. While in Seattle, he organized another percussion band, collected unusual instruments and toured the Northwest. It was also at this time that he met and began his lifelong collaboration with Merce Cunningham.

He returned to California in 1938 to join the faculty of Mills College. His works of this period were still fairly conventional, at least by his later standards. His "Music for Wind Instruments" and "Metamorphosis" (both 1938) showed a continuing allegiance to Schoenberg's 12-tone system, and his "First Construction" (1939), for a percussion ensemble that used sleigh bells, thunder sheets and brake drums, explored layers of interlocking rhythms.

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But Mr. Cage was also beginning to explore new territory. His "Imaginary Landscape No. 1," composed in 1939, used variable-speed turntables, a muted piano and a cymbal. The next year he wrote his first piece for prepared piano, "Bacchanale."

In 1942, after brief stays in San Francisco and Chicago, Mr. Cage moved to New York City, which remained his home base thereafter. He again assembled a percussion group, which gave its first New York performance at the Museum of Modern Art in February 1943. The concert received a great deal of attention, not all of it favorable. Among the listeners who objected to Mr. Cage's eclectic instrumental arsenal, which included flower pots, cow bells and frequency oscillators, was Noel Straus, whose review in The New York Times said Mr. Cage's music "had an inescapable resemblance to the meaningless sounds made by children amusing themselves by banging on tin pans and other resonant kitchen utensils."

Soon after he arrived in New York, Mr. Cage undertook his first collaboration with Mr. Cunningham, "Credo in Us," and in the mid-1940's they toured extensively together. In 1947, Mr. Cage was commissioned to write "The Seasons" for the Ballet Society. A graceful, consonant work with a pronounced Indian influence that reflected Mr. Cage's growing interest in Eastern philosophy, "The Seasons" is one of his few scores for traditional symphony orchestra.

Mr. Cage's attraction to Eastern philosophy began around 1945, when he began an extensive study of Zen Buddhism at Columbia University. This interest had a profound and lasting effect on his work. "The Seasons" was an attempt to express the Indian view of the seasons as quiescence (winter), creation (spring), preservation (summer) and destruction (autumn). The Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, an exhaustive, hourlong study of the instrument's capabilities, is the Indian concept of "permanent emotions," including the heroic, erotic, wondrous, mirthful and sorrowful. A Discovery Of 'I Ching'

In 1950, after returning to the United States from a tour of Europe with Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Cage discovered the "I Ching," the Chinese "book of changes" that one consults after tossing a set of coins. This method gave Mr. Cage the idea that lies at the heart of his "chance" compositions. If readings in the "I Ching" could be governed by the chance toss of a coin, why couldn't musical composition? Indeed, why couldn't musical works be created using chance processes with the audience looking on, so that the composition and the performance were one and the same?

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Among Mr. Cage's earliest works using this principle was "Music of Changes" (1951). The musical elements of the piece -- pitch, duration, timbre, dynamics -- were determined by the performers using charts based on the "I Ching" and by tossing coins. "Imaginary Landscape 4" (1951) explored chance procedures in a different way: The work is scored for 12 radios, operated by two performers. One performer changed stations, the other worked the volume control. The dial turning was precisely notated, but what was heard depended on what was being broadcast during the performance. "Europera 5" (1991) works similarly.

As he continued writing chance works, Mr. Cage developed a novel view of composition, in which he came to regard composing not as a way of imposing order on nature, but as a way of creating the circumstances in which art could adapt itself to its surroundings. Probably the purest example of this philosophy is Mr. Cage's "4'33"" (1952), in which a performer stands silently on stage. Inevitably, listeners were forced to focus on nonmusical sounds, or in the case of an unusually quite audience, on the quality of silence itself.

Mr. Cage's explorations repelled listeners and composers committed to music's traditional qualities, but attracted experimenters like Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman and David Tudor, with whom he collaborated on the Project of Music for Magnetic Tape. Mr. Cage's first tape work was "Imaginary Landscape No. 5" (1952), composed for a dance piece by Jean Erdman. Mr. Cage's method here was to tape 42 phonograph records, chop the tapes into short pieces, and to use chance operations to determine how the pieces of tape should be reassembled. Pieces like "Williams Mix" (1952) and "Fontana Mix" (1958) used tape in even more complex and convoluted ways.

But Mr. Cage did not abandon acoustical music, nor did he run out of unusual ways to write pieces. In "Water Music" (1952), almost as much a Cageian classic as "4'33"," he had a pianist pour water from one pot into another, and perform various other actions using a radio, a whistle and a deck of cards.

As his works, and the varied reactions to it, brought him increasing notoreity, Mr. Cage came to be increasingly in demand as a lecturer, teacher and performer. He undertook tours of Europe and Japan with Mr. Tudor, one of his electronic music collaborators, and he continued to tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He taught classes in experimental music in Darmstadt, Germany, and lectured on his theories of indeterminate composition at the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958. And at the New School, in New York, he taught classes on mushroom identification, another of his lifelong interests. Of Experiments In Later Works

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Mr. Cage's major works since the late 1960's include "Hpschd" (1969), a collaboration with Lejaren Hiller for 7 harpsichords, 51 tapes, films, slides and colored lights; "Cheap Imitation" (1969, orchestrated 1972), based on a piece by Satie, which keeps the original rhythmic patterns but replaces this French composer's pitches with notes selected through chance procedures; "Etudes Australes" (1974-5), a virtuoso piano work with a score based on astronomical charts; "Roaratorio" (1979), an electronic piece containing thousands of sounds mentioned in James Joyce's novel "Finnegans Wake," and the five "Europera" works, composed from 1987 to 1991.

Mr. Cage's books include "Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music" (1959), written in collaboration with Kathleen O'Donnell Hoover; "Silence" (1961); "A Year From Monday" (1967); "M" (1973); "Empty Words" (1979), which he also regarded as a performance piece, and read from at this year's Summergarden concerts; "Theme and Variations" (1982); "X" (1983), and "I-IV," a collection of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1988-89.

He also amassed a sizable catalogue of visual works -- photography, monotypes, prints, etchings, paintings and some of his more graphic scores -- from 1969 to this year.

In his later years, Mr. Cage was the recipient of many honors. His 60th, 70th and 75th birthdays were celebrated with extensive concert series and tributes around the world, and this year's celebrations anticipating his 80th birthday are well under way. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978. He received the New York Mayor's Award of Honor for Arts and Culture in 1981 and, in 1982, the French Government awarded Mr. Cage its highest honor for distinguished contribution to cultural life, Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Mr. Cage was a soft-spoken, mercurial man who remained keenly interested in new music. He made himself easily accessible to young composers and critics, and was often seen at concerts in downtown Manhattan.

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Mr. Cage's marriage to Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff ended in divorce in 1945. From 1970 until his death, he lived with Mr. Cunningham.

There are no immediate survivors.

The obituary also rendered the titles of two of Mr. Cage's works incorrectly. The book in which his Norton Lectures were collected was "I-VI"; the work performed by the New York Philharmonic in 1964 was "Atlas Eclipticalis With Winter Music."

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